A few words on Cyrillic Encoding

(This is an abridged version of Paul Gorodyansky’s text, for more info. see: http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/PaulGor/fonts_e.htm )

Different Cyrillic fonts use different encoding (numbers that correspond to the letters). Computers work only with numbers at machine level hence letters in a font system must be mapped to numbers; this mapping is called encoding.

Unfortunately, there are several different, incompatible encodings for Cyrillic, her are just a few:

· MS Windows uses "Windows 1251 Cyrillic" encoding .
In a browser's menu this encoding is called "Cyrillic(Windows)" or "Cyrillic (Windows-1251)"

· On the Internet, encoding KOI8-U for Ukrainian and KOI8-R is used for Russian in Mail and News, as well as on some Web sites

· Macintosh uses "Mac Cyrillic" encoding

· Unix computers use either "Cyrillic ISO-8859-5" encoding or KOI8-R , KOI8-U

Different Cyrillic fonts use different encodings and so if a web browser uses an encoding different from the one you use you get gibberish.

For example, the word for "three" has the following Cyrillic letters in it - три
written with a font of Windows-1251 Cyrillic encoding, will be stored as 242 240 232 - but 242 240 232 in KOI8-R would read РПХ which makes no sense.

Users of the U.S. version of Windows NT 4.0/2000/XP/2003/Vista already have such fonts (Windows-1251 active! So you do not have to do anything. I assume the same is true for Mac users with the latest Mac Operating System.

Users of older operating systems versions have to configure the operating system for Cyrillic fonts.

Even for more recent Windows 2000 some clicking has to be done:

Even though Cyrillic Windows-1251 fonts are already active in Windows 2000, it requires (unlike Windows NT 4.0 and Windows XP/2003/Vista) a special procedure to enable full Cyrillic support for a user, for example, enable encoding conversion and/or getting Russian keyboard layout file.
That is, a user of Windows 2000 must perform the following additional steps (not required under Windows NT 4.0/XP/2003/Vista).

How to enable full user-level Cyrillic support under Windows 2000:

1. Start / Settings / Control Panel
2. In the CONTROL PANEL window - double-click on the globe-like Regional Options icon
3. In the Regional Options window, in its General tab, see the second frame - Language Settings for the System.
4. See if you have a box "Cyrillic" checked.
   If not, then click on this box to activate user-level Cyrillic support and then click on Apply below right.
   You will be asked to insert the Windows 2000 CD-ROM and then the required files will be copied from there.

Users of Windows 95/98 in addition have to install Cyrillic fonts.